P EN GUIN P RES S

MOSES ASCENDING

With an introduction by Date: 27.07.2020

Sam Selvon
Hari Kunzru Designer: Æ
Prod. Controller:
Pub. Date:
ISBN: 9780241504390

‘The best folk poet S P IN E WIDT H : 13 M M

the British Caribbean
• Estimated

Moses Ascending
has yet produced’ • Confirmed
George Lamming

Moses thinks he’s got it made. Originally FORM AT

a poor Caribbean immigrant, he is now
the proud landlord of a ramshackle house B-format paperback
in Shepherd’s Bush, London. He has visions
of being master of his own domain, writing Cover photograph
his memoirs while his trusty sidekick and © Horace Ové.
handyman, Bob, does all the work. Author photograph
© Ida Kar/Mary Evans
Print
But Moses’ problems are far from over …
Picture Library
• CMYK
Soon a Black Power group take over the
basement, headed by the indomitable –
• Pantone 7464 C (Eau de Nil 2)

but very sexy – Brenda, and an illegal

people-smuggling ring is discovered FIN IS H ES
upstairs. Not to mention harassment
from racist police, sheep-slaughtering Coated Cover Board
in the back yard and a Black Panther
(the human kind) on the loose.
P ROOFIN G M ET H OD
Will Moses’ elaborately constructed
castle in the air be demolished by • Wet proofs
these unruly forces?
• No further
Digital only
Following the fortunes of characters
from Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners,
• proof required

Sam Selvon
MO D E R N C L A S S I C S

Moses Ascending is a hilarious and

telling depiction of 1970s Britain.

I S B N 978-0-241-50439-0 Moses
Ascending
PENGUIN
90000
Fiction M O D E R N
CAN. $00.00 C L A S S I C S

9 780241 504390
U.K. £00.00

9780241504390_MosesAscending_COV.indd 1,3 27/07/2020 14:39

Copyrighted Material
P E NG U I N M OD E R N C L A S S I C S

Moses Ascending

Sam Selvon was born in Trinidad in 1923. From 1945–50, he worked as

a journalist for the Trinidad Guardian and was literary editor of the
Guardian Weekly. During this period he published a number of short
stories and poems under pseudonyms before departing for London in
1950. Soon after his arrival in the metropolis his first full-length novel,
A Brighter Sun (1952) appeared; it received much international acclaim
and established Selvon as a major voice in contemporary literature.
It was followed by a number of other influential works set both in
­London and in Trinidad. These include the collection of short stories
Ways of Sunlight (1957); his London fictions – The Lonely Londoners
(1956), The Housing Lark (1965), Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrat-
ing (1983) – as well as his Trinidadian novels – An Island Is a World (1955),
Turn Again Tiger (1958), I Hear Thunder (1963), The Plains of Caroni
(1970) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). Selvon remained in Lon-
don until 1978 when he left the UK for Calgary in Canada. By the time
of his departure from London he had earned the title of the ‘father of
Black writing’ in Britain. Sam Selvon died in 1994 on a brief trip home
to Trinidad.

Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist (2002), Trans-
mission (2004), My Revolutions (2007), Gods Without Men (2011) and White
Tears (2017).

Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
S a m S e lvon
Moses Ascending
With an Introduction by Hari Kunzru

P E NG UI N B O O K S

Copyrighted Material
PE N G U I N C L A S S I C S
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies

whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published by Davis-Poynter Limited 1975

Published in Penguin Classics 2008
Reissued in 2020
001

Text copyright © Sam Selvon, 1957

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Set in 11.25/15 pt Monotype Dante by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd,

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: ​­978–0–241–50439–0

www.greenpenguin.co.uk

Penguin Random House is committed to a

sustainable future for our business, our readers
and our planet. This book is made from Forest
Stewardship Council® certified paper.

Copyrighted Material
 To my children,
and the rest of the world

Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
 Introduction

In a  essay entitled ‘Power?’ (note the sceptical question

mark), V. S. Naipaul draws connections between the origins of
Trinidadian carnival and contemporary black nationalism in the
Caribbean. Dressing up for their nineteenth-century celebra-
tions, ‘people who were slaves by day saw themselves . . . as
kings, queens, dauphins, princesses.’ This parody of the pomp
and circumstance of a white-run world quickly became ‘a vision
of the black millennium, as much a vision of revenge as of a
black world made whole again.’ Naipaul sees carnivalesque
chaos and violence at play in the Black Power movement of his
own day, which he patronizingly characterizes as ‘mystical,
vague and threatening,’ a politically incoherent blend of ‘rage,
drama and style.’¹
Samuel Selvon was, like Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian
descent, and evidently shared some of his misgivings about
Black Power. In , he presented a paper called ‘Three Into
One Can’t Go: East Indian, Trinidadian, West Indian’ in which
he described his unease about black nationalism and his feeling
that as an Indian, ‘we best hads don’t talk too loud before we
antagonise the Black people.’² So perhaps it’s not surprising that
Moses Ascending, published in , has both a carnivalesque

vii

Copyrighted Material
atmosphere and an underlying tone of cynicism. It’s a book full
of mockery and dirty jokes, shot through with disappointment
and undiluted anger. A generation later, it makes for fascinating
but uncomfortable reading.
In the Notting Hill of the early seventies we rediscover Moses
Aloetta, last seen twenty years before in Selvon’s masterpiece,
The Lonely Londoners. In the fifties, Moses was a reluctant
‘welfare officer’ for new arrivals from the islands, grumbling as
he helped people find their feet in the Mother Country. Now
he’s installed as the tin-pot monarch of a tumble-down terraced
house in Shepherd’s Bush. He lives in the attic ‘penthouse’,
served by a white factotum called Bob, who helps him run the
place as a multi-racial hostel. The basement flat, at the very
bottom of this microcosmic ‘upstairs downstairs’ arrangement,
is used as a headquarters by a local black political group, but
Moses wants nothing to do with ‘black power, nor white power,
nor any fucking power but my own’. ‘I just want to live in
peace,’ he writes in the ‘memoirs’ which form the nominal
substance of the novel, ‘and reap the harvest of the years of
slavery I put in in Brit’n.’
The house, bought from his Jamaican friend Tolroy,
represents a tenuous security in the turbulent world of black
London. After years of uncertainty, Moses relishes being a
landlord: ‘If you are a tenant, you catch your arse forever, but
if you are a landlord, it is a horse of a different colour’. Like the
slaves dressing up as kings and queens, Moses, with his drinks
cupboard and his white butler, is acting out a charade of
aristocratic power. ‘I was Master of the house,’ he exults.
‘[W]hen the tenants hear my heavy tread they cower and shrink
in their rooms, in case I snap my fingers and say OUT to any

viii

Copyrighted Material
of them.’ Now that he’s a man of substance, he wants to put a
distance between himself and ‘the old brigade’ of Caribbean
ne’er-do-wells. The fellow-feeling he grudgingly displayed as a
younger man seems to have been ground out of him, replaced
by a toxic bitterness. ‘It is,’ he writes, ‘always your own people
who let you down in the end.’ Instead of friends, he has
possessions, and frets about ‘the state of my Chippendale furni-
ture, and Wedgwood crockery, albeit third hand, with which
I had furnished the rooms . . . How was the warp and woof of
my Axeminster carpets . . . ?’
There is something of the shipwrecked mariner about Moses,
washed up on a cold and lonely shore, making do with what
he can forage from the second-hand stalls of Portobello. His
self-sufficiency and his carnival-king status as ‘Master of the
house’ make him an echo of that paragon of Protestant thrift
and virtuous accumulation, Robinson Crusoe. ‘There was my
majesty,’ writes Defoe’s sailor in his own ‘memoir’, ‘the prince
and lord of the whole island; I had the lives of all my subjects at
my absolute command.’³ Selvon makes the Crusoe connection
explicit. In a pointed inversion, Bob the factotum (‘a white
immigrant . . . from somewhere in the Midlands’) is described
as ‘my man Friday . . . a willing worker, eager to learn the ways
of the Black man . . . I decided to teach him the Bible when
I could make the time.’
Into Moses’s strictly individualistic world steps ‘the black com-
munity’, in the form of his old friend Galahad, who has dived
head-first into nationalist politics. Moses sneers at his ‘Black
Power glad rags’ (‘a pair of platforms, yellow socks, purple cor-
duroy trousers . . .’) and suspects that he has ulterior motives for
coming to visit. In his experience, appeals to community spirit

ix

Copyrighted Material
are usually only made by people who want something. For his
part Galahad approves of the Shepherd’s Bush house:

‘I am glad to see you in prosperous surroundings. It is good for

Our People to make progress. But you must not forget the
struggle.’
‘I’m glad that you appreciate that I struggled to get where
I am,’ I say.
‘Not that struggle,’ he wave my words away. ‘I mean the
struggle. It is only right that you should contribute to the cause.
We need financiers. Without the black gentry and nobility on
our side, it is a losing battle.’
‘I didn’t know a battle was going on . . .’

Idealism gets a rough ride in Moses Ascending. Galahad’s motives

are as base as Moses fears, yet despite his misgivings Selvon’s
anti-hero does get sucked into ‘the struggle’. He opens his wallet
and his home to the revolutionaries, and even gets arrested
(albeit by mistake) on a Black Power demonstration. Sadly, his
flirtation with solidarity just serves to make him feel more
alone: ‘my brush with the law only make me realize that I had
no friends in the world, that I had to peddle my own canoe
for survival.’ The substitution of peddle for paddle is crushing.
Moses, Homo economicus, will always be a lonely Londoner, his
occasional yearnings for community, even love, blocked by his
suspicion of other black people.
If Moses Ascending is a novel about the tension between the
black individual and a ‘community’ which appears to conspire
to drag him down, it’s also a novel about a first generation
immigrant in a country he no longer fully understands. By ,

Copyrighted Material
the Notting Hill of The Lonely Londoners had receded into the
past. The  riots, five nights of August Bank Holiday violence
in which three-hundred strong mobs of Teddy Boys went
‘nigger hunting’ through W, marked the beginning of a
new era of tension, exemplified by Enoch Powell’s infamous
‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, given at a Conservative party meeting
in Birmingham in . Quoting an unnamed constituent (a
‘decent, ordinary fellow Englishman’), Powell warned that ‘in
this country, in fifteen or twenty years time, the black man
will have the whip hand over the white man.’ As well as the
volume of immigration from Commonwealth countries, Powell
objected to proposed anti-discrimination legislation, alluding in
patrician style to the Sibylline prophecies described in Virgil’s
Aeneid.

Here is the means of showing that the immigrator communities

can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and cam-
paign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate
the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the
ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with
foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber
foaming with much blood’.

The next day Edward Heath dismissed him from his shadow
cabinet, prompting a deluge of supportive letters and telegrams
and anti-immigrant marches by London dockers and Smithfield
meat porters. The Race Relations Acts of  and , which
Powell found so objectionable, were the first anti-discrimination
legislation on the British statute books. The  act made
expression of racial prejudice illegal in ‘places of public resort’,

xi

Copyrighted Material
excluding shops and boarding houses from the definition of
such places. The second, passed despite the furore caused by
Powell’s speech, extended these meagre provisions to a more
general ban on refusing housing, employment or public services
to someone because of their ethnic background.
Though minority rights were asserted they were not en-
forced. ‘No blacks’ notices were now illegal in Notting Hill
hostels, but police harassment, deaths in custody, endemic
institutional racism and the growth of the National Front all
fed a sharp rise in black militancy. The W of Moses Ascending
is no longer the district of Lord Kitchener (the Calypsonian
whose famous song ‘London is the Place for Me’ became the
unofficial anthem of the Windrush generation), but has be-
come the backyard of the Black Panthers, the extortionist and
self-styled revolutionary Michael X and the Mangrove Nine,
activists associated with a restaurant on the All Saints Road,
whose trial became a cause célèbre in . A year after the pub-
lication of the novel, the  Notting Hill Carnival riots broke
out, inaugurating another new era in British ‘community’ poli-
tics. First-generation immigrants like Moses had been defini-
tively succeeded by a second generation, represented in the
novel by Brenda, the maxi-skirted siren of the local black revolu-
tionaries. Moses is frankly amazed by her, and not just because
of her mesmerizing backside:

If I did shut my eyes, I would have thought it was a nordic

talking, the accent was so high. She didn’t sound like some of
them women what try to put on English and it don’t fit them
properly. She sound like the real thing, and I know without
asking that she was a Black Briton.

xii

Copyrighted Material
Brenda, with her ‘Afro hair, Afro blouse, and Afro gleam in the
eye’, is soon installed in the basement, and Moses begins to
consider the ‘advantages of having a regular woman about the
house’. ‘I am not getting any younger,’ he writes, ‘and cannot
hustle pussy and scout the streets of London as in days of
yore.’ Moses’s unreconstructed sexism, expressed in extended
ruminations on such topics as the ‘more than a hundred white
women’ he has slept with, and the qualities of a certain ‘proud
and defiant part of the [black female] anatomy’, no doubt
contributed to Selvon’s humiliation before an audience at the
Commonwealth Institute in , when his face was slapped by
an activist, angry at the objectification of female characters in
his work. In , with feminism on the rise, Selvon’s Moses
must have already seemed like a dinosaur, and Brenda a two-
dimensional cartoon whose willingness to jump into the sack
with Moses and Bob can’t have endeared her to the black
feminists she was supposed to satirize.
Selvon’s portrayal of the revolutionaries in Moses’s basement
is only slightly surer in its touch. The photos pinned on their
walls are not of Huey Newton or Malcolm X (or even the newly
minted ‘third world superstar’ Bob Marley), but of ‘Lamming
and Salkey and Baldwin’, writers of Selvon’s own generation,
the generation of which George Jackson remarked (in a quote
wryly repeated by James Baldwin himself in ‘An Open Letter
to My Sister Angela Y. Davis’) ‘there are no healthy brothers –
none at all’.⁴ By  Selvon’s own critical reputation was in
free-fall, and given the prevailing climate of intergenerational
suspicion it’s hard not to see his invocation of a familiar canon
as a piece of wishful thinking, or a desperate attempt to reclaim
lost cultural ground.

xiii

Copyrighted Material
 While working on Moses Ascending, Selvon co-wrote Pressure,
generally regarded as the first ‘black British’ feature film. His
partner was the director, photographer and fellow Trinidadian
Horace Ové. The story of Tony, a second-generation black
Briton trying to get by in Notting Hill, has many links to Moses
Ascending, not least in its depiction of the Black Power move-
ment which eventually offers Tony a home after he’s been
alienated by the ‘white world’. Tony prefers fish and chips to
patties, has white friends, and hopes to get work as a book-
keeper, but retreats into petty crime and political militancy after
a series of bruising experiences with employers, neighbours and
the police. Ové was far more engaged with Black Power than
Selvon, and the depiction of the political milieu in Pressure is
both more accurate and more sympathetic (if less funny) than
that of Moses Ascending. By narrating the film from the point of
view of Tony, rather than an ‘old salt’ like Moses, Ové and Selvon
cross a line into a new realm of experience – not the world of the
immigrant who can, as the Powellites put it, ‘go home’, but those
who were ‘born here’. As Ové remarked in an interview after the
film’s belated  release, ‘these young black British kids are
trapped. They have broken with the older generation whose
philosophy is ‘‘hush your mouth, work hard, don’t complain’’.
The young kids don’t want to go on eating curried goat.’⁵
Moses is certainly not one to hush his mouth, but he’s still
every inch a member of that ‘older generation’. He can often
sound like a black version of Rigsby, the craven, scheming
landlord in the ITV sitcom Rising Damp. Selvon’s seventies are
peppered with television references (This is Your Life, Upstairs
Downstairs) and his depiction of race politics has a crude knock-
about humour that owes much to TV series like Till Death Do

xiv

Copyrighted Material
Us Part. When Moses gets involved with people-smuggling, the
reader is treated to a confused and unpleasant depiction of
South Asian immigrants, including a character just referred to
as ‘Paki’, who seems to be a hybrid of Hindu and Muslim,
pointing his prayer mat to the East, sitting in the lotus position
and declaiming ‘There is no god but the god, and Mohammed
is his prophet.’ Selvon, the Trinidadian Christian, clearly didn’t
bother to learn much more than Moses about the people staying
in his fictional upstairs room.
Flaws like this contributed to Selvon’s critical eclipse, and
put Moses Ascending beyond the pale for a generation of critics
whose work on ‘postcolonial’ literature was part of a wider
anti-racist politics. In his introduction to a  edition of The
Lonely Londoners, Kenneth Ramchand warns against ‘loose talk
about a Moses trilogy’, on the grounds that while the Moses of
the earlier book is ‘seeking answers to profound questions with
an intensity that suggests a closeness to the author . . . the latter
books . . . suggest a disengagement by the author from his
protagonist which at times . . . feels like cynicism or evasion.’⁶
Unfortunately for Ramchand, his attempt to preserve the purity
of The Lonely Londoners was made difficult by Selvon himself,
who peppers Moses Ascending with references to its predecessor.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that what discomforted
Ramchand wasn’t so much ‘disengagement’ as the biliousness
of an ageing writer who felt he’d been denied his critical and
commercial due.
Twenty-five years later it seems less important to present
Selvon as a heroic postcolonial saint than to place his work (and
attitudes) in historical context. His pioneering use of Caribbean
vernacular was acknowledged by peers such as V. S. Naipaul,

xv

Copyrighted Material
who said in a  interview that ‘because Sam has written so
authentically he has made it easier for the rest of us who want
to make people talk the way they do. Sam was the first man,
and I think we ought to give him credit for this, who made it
possible.’⁷ There is much to admire in Moses Ascending, not
least the extraordinary pages where Selvon describes, in lyrical
satirical prose that’s all the more intense for the cold anger that
lies behind it, the ‘good fortune’ of black menial workers who
have to wake up before the rest of the population:

The alarms of all the black people in Brit’n are timed to ring
before the rest of the population. It is their destiny to be up and
about at the crack o’dawn. In these days of pollution and
environment, he is very lucky, for he can breathe the freshest
air of the new day before anybody else . . . The first flake of
snow in the winter falls on a black man. The first ray of sunlight
in summer falls on a black man. The first yellow leaf in the
autumn falls on a black man. The first crocus in the spring is
seen by a black man and he harks to the cuckoo long before all
them other people what write to the newspapers to say they
was the first . . . The population masses believe that racial
violence going to erupt because he is being continuously and
continually oppressed and kept down. Not so. It is true that
racial violence is going to erupt, but not for that reason. What
going to happen is one of these days the white man going to
realize that the black man have it cushy . . .

Moses Ascending is a rough-and-tumble book, a carnival, and

fittingly it ends with the high brought low and the low raised
up high. It’s also a depiction of a city and a country in transition,

xvi

Copyrighted Material
a Britain making its way out of the post-imperial twilight
towards a future lit by a brighter sun – a future Sam Selvon
helped to imagine.
Hari Kunzru, 

Notes

. V. S. Naipaul, ‘Power?’, in The Writer and the World (London:

Picador, ).
. Sam Selvon, ‘Three Into One Can’t Go: East Indian, Trinidadian,
West Indian’ (Wasifiri #, Autumn ).
. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (London: Penguin Classics, ).
. James Baldwin, ‘An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis’
(NYRB, Volume , Number ,  January ).
. Horace Ové, ‘Horace Ové in Black and White’, interview with
Stuart Hood (Sunday Times,  September ) (Pressure/Baldwin’s
Nigger: Two Films by Horace Ové, BFI, ).
. Kenneth Ramchand, ‘An introduction to this novel’, The Lonely
Londoners (London: Longman, ).
. Radio broadcast, V. S. Naipaul with Stuart Hall, ‘In Discussion on
British Caribbean Writers’ ( April ), quoted in Sukhdev Sandhu
London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (London:
HarperCollins, ).

xvii

Copyrighted Material
Copyrighted Material
It was Sir Galahad who drew my attention to the property. He
was reading Dalton’s Weekly, as was his wont, looking for new
jobs; roaming through bedsitter land; picking out secondhand
miscellany he need and could afford; musing on the lonely
hearts column to see if any desperate rich white woman seeks
black companion with a view to matrimony; and speculating
when he come to the properties-for-sale page, buying houses
and renovating them to sell and make big profit.
Little did he dream that whilst he dreamt I was on the lookout
for an investment in truth.
‘Hello Moses!’ he say, stretching the pages out and backing
the one with the item he was reading. ‘Tolroy’s property is up
for sale. Listen to this: ‘‘Highly desirable mansion in exclusive
part of Shepherd’s Bush. Vacant possession. Owner migrating
to Jamaica. Viewing strictly by appointment with agent.’’ That’s
Tolroy’s house. It got his address.’
‘Does it say how much he’s asking?’ I ask.
‘No. He’ll be lucky if he could give it away. You never seen it?’
‘No, you?’
‘Yes. You ever build houses with playing cards when you
was a little boy?’

Copyrighted Material
 ‘Yeah.’
‘And you shift one card and the whole house collapse?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s Tolroy’s mansion.’
Nevertheless Galahad didn’t know one arse about houses;
it’s true some of these terraces in London look like they might
capsize any minute, but united we stand, divided we fall, and
knowing Tolroy as I do, it stand to reason that he would not of
bought no end-of-terrace house, but one plunk in the middle
what would have support on both sides.
True enough it turned out when I went to see it and get
some more details from Tolroy, such as it had a five-year lease,
two of which was gone, and it was due for LCC demolition. It
sounded like the sort of thing I could afford.
‘That’s why it’s going so cheap, Moses,’ Tolroy say. ‘If you
let out rooms you can make your money back in no time at all.
Besides, you will be a landlord and not a tenant.’
It was this latter point which decided me in the end. After all
these years paying rent, I had the ambition to own my own
property in London, no matter how ruinous or dilapidated it
was. If you are a tenant, you catch your arse forever, but if you
are a landlord, it is a horse of a different colour. Take the HP,
for instance:
‘Er, Mr Moses, er, I’m sorry about this procedure, but we
usually ask if our customers know anyone who will be prepared
to act as a guarantor? Perhaps your landlord?’
‘I beg your pardon, I am the landlord.’
‘Oh . . . how silly of me . . . if you’ll just sign the form here,
SIR . . . sit down . . . use my chair.’

Copyrighted Material